China trains its cannons on digital pirates

Agreed. I'm anti/pro piracy. It really depends.

Personally since netflix / lovefilm I don't really download anything anymore, because I finally have a cheap alternative. Why spend £18 on a new DVD I will only watch once, maybe twice when I can pay £5 and rent a couple DVDs a month?

The only problem now though is software for me, most software I use is free, paint.net, libreoffice etc, but there are still people selling very simple applications and charging £15 for it. It's nowhere near as bad now as it used to be a few years back, and I think all these new business practices will help push things along in the right direction. But punishing people for downloading a film illegally isn't the right direction.

The vast majority of people who DL things have no intention of ever buying them, if they couldn't get it for free then they simply wouldn't get it. Heck if I couldn't find a copy of office online for free (before openoffice) I'd have just used notepad. Likewise I wouldn't have bought a CD just because I couldn't DL it, and I wouldn't have bought a DVD if I couldn't find it online.

Now though with services like Deezer or Netflix I can actually watch things online for a price I think is very damn reasonable. Hell I'd honestly say I think they're undercharging a little. . If more areas of the music industry realised this then maybe the pirate scene wouldn't be quite as far reaching. If they want to make more profit off of their latest blockbuster film, put it on netflix or lovefilm sooner.

Come on

Be realistic, they will just get rid of those that fail to pay the bribes on time.

The rest can be considered state sponsored.

Re: Real-Fake

When I saw the title "Real-Fake", I was reminded of the markets in Hong Kong, where I used to live.

There was a price difference between a "Genuine Fake", targetted at rich gwailos, and HK-Chinese, and bargain-barrel fakes, mostly aimed at mainland Chinese immigrants. In the latter category you saw a lot of Tommy Hifliger, Quiksliver, etc, but I think my favourite remains the "Bolux" watch...

Re: The Capitalist Party

"it is Capitalist, in the rawest sense"

Hardly - government interference in business and the market in China is collossal. A Chinese businessman earlier this year was sentenced to jail merely for purchasing information on his business rivals (publically available information that another had collated to sell). Even the land-registry has become a closed book making it hard to find out who owns what property unless you happen to have the right connections in the government. How is that "Capitalist", unless you are one of these people who consider Capitalism a synonym for Corruption.